March 17, 2015
By Phil Maynard
Creating Powerful Worship Experiences
(Part 3 of an 8-part blog series)
Clarifying the Destination
It is difficult to know if we have successfully arrived at our destination without first having a clear concept of where it is we are headed. And likewise, it’s difficult to get everybody else to the same destination unless everybody has agreed on where we’re going.
To quote the great Yogi Berra, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll wind up somewhere else.” Worship is no different. It’s not uncommon for worship to end up somewhere other than where we intended, but it’s even more common for the congregational worship experience to end up nowhere in particular because there was no clear destination in mind to begin with.
For congregations in transition this can be a tense dialogue, because 1) Worship is worship, and how can one kind of worship that brings glory to God be any more effective or meaningful than any other kind (framed often in the “turning worship into entertainment” complaint) and 2) There is a long history and tradition of forms and elements of worship and a panic that any kind of rethinking of worship means throwing out all of what has come before.
The purpose of this particular blog is not to advocate for any one particular style or approach to worship, but to reinforce the truth that the conversatio